Google adds voice search for eight Indian languages: Here’s how it will work

Google’s voice search is one of the growing features for the mobile app, and the company has now announced support for more Indian languages. Google is adding Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu this list. Overall, Google Voice Search will now support eight more Indian languages.

The language support feature will be part of the Gboard app on Android and the Google App as well. Native speakers of these languages will now be able to give voice queries in these, rather than relying on Hindi or English all the time.

In order to use one of the new languages, a user will have to go the settings in the Google Search app, and pick the language in Voice settings menu. On Gboard, users can choose the language in the Settings after installing the app on their phone. Once that is done, a user can just type on the microphone symbol and start speaking. Google is also rolling out Voice search support for Indian languages on its iOS app.

Google says it worked with native language speakers in order to collect the speech samples. This process helped train Google’s machine learning models to understand the sounds and words of the new languages. The company says relying on actual sample also improved the accuracy of the search. It adds that voice search will get better with time, once more users take to it and the machine learning systems will consequently learn more.

With mobile driving search across the world, Voice Search is one aspect which will continue to grow. Speakers from Google, Amazon, even Apple all rely on Voice Search, and Google has been at the forefront of pushing this.

Voice search being extended to other Indian languages is not surprisingly at all, given how Android dominates the Indian smartphone. Google expects the next wave of users coming online in India will be mostly native language speakers, rather than English speakers. Thus it needs to make sure that its core products are ready for these users.

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